How many people tuned in to the State of the Union address?
The television audience for President Obama's State of the Union address fell to 31.7 million this year, the lowest number on record, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen totaled the average audience watching the address on 13 networks, and Univision, which played the address on tape delay.
While the TV audience is dwindling, the social media audience for 140-character bits of the address may be growing. In the U.S., Nielsen Social says, 9.7 million people "saw one or more of the 2.6 million Tweets" sent out about the State of the Union address. That activity peaked at 10:08 p.m. -- that's when the president ad-libbed a line after saying he had no more campaigns to run. Responding to the applause, Mr. Obama added, "I know 'cause I won both of 'em." That moment resulted in 44,000 tweets in a single minute.
The White House has no doubt been reminded that the television audience in 2015 is close to half of the 59 million who tuned in for the president's first address to a joint session of Congress, and it's been trying to chase down the 30 million who have stopped turning on their TVs with an aggressive online and mobile campaign, airing the address on whitehouse.gov, and more elaborately on Medium.
It even took the unusual step of publicly releasing the president's entire prepared remarks for the address online at Medium, shortly before Mr. Obama arrived in the Capitol, to "allow people to follow along with the speech as they watch in real time, to view charts and infographics on key areas, to tweet their favorite lines, and to leave notes to provide feedback." The White House called it part of an effort "to reach a wide online audience and give people a range of ways to consume the speech."
While the White House is still going through its numbers, its website says that 1.2 million viewed the address on whitehouse.gov, 200,000 fewer than the 1.4 million who watched last year, according to the Los Angeles Times.
As must-see TV continues to slip away, the White House may have found some of its lost audience, but certainly not all of it, and those they are wooing back are likely seeing it in smaller pieces.